


fire and water for your love

by ilgaksu



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alternate Universe - Avatar & Benders Setting, Alternate Universe - Avatar (TV) Fusion, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-26
Updated: 2018-08-26
Packaged: 2019-07-02 20:57:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 582
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15804438
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ilgaksu/pseuds/ilgaksu
Summary: The war party returns home at dawn.





	fire and water for your love

**Author's Note:**

  * For [bleulily (winterfells)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/winterfells/gifts).



> This is a scene from a pre-existing ATLA AU I've never gotten around to posting properly. 
> 
> For Moira.

The war party returns home at dawn. In the semi-darkness, Lance’s face is opaque, distant under a layer of warrior’s paint.  The cold morning light, alongside the grey colour of the pigment, gives a strange cast to the warmth of his skin. The set of his shoulders is wrapped in white fox fur, wreathed without being softened. 

Keith’s mother had told him a story, sometimes - about fire benders who breathed life into temple statues, turning them molton and malleable, about how when they struck out across the battlefield, people had collapsed at the sight, their knees weakened with fear as though turned to water. It took him years to wonder what had happened to the people who had fled, spread out across the world: to realise that this was a story not of victory, but of conquest. Diaspora. 

When he turns to look at Keith, the unfurling flare of black paint around his eyes makes the colour of them, by contrast, startlingly blue. For a second, Keith is caught, hooked, reeled in. Then Lance winks, and the illusion shatters, but Keith is still held there, shivering, as though on some kind of fishing line. He looks away, snaps it, waits in the aftermath. 

“Did you miss me?” Lance says happily, ducking into the tent and throwing himself down next to Keith on the furs. 

“Like a hole in the head,” Keith mutters, sleep-groggy and still falling back into routine. Lance gasps, faux-affronted, but Keith can practically hear him smiling. Lance leans over, presses a paint-tacky kiss to Keith’s cheek, high on the bone, laughs when Keith swats him away. He leaves the shape memory of himself embedded in Keith’s bedding when he gets up to go wash his face. When Keith rubs at his own face, his fingertips come away tinged grey. Even statues have a heart, they say. And although they say it’s made of stone, a heart is a heart, isn’t it? 

“I wish I could have gone with you,” Keith admits to his own hands. The sound of water, splashing around in its corner bowl, stops. Lance sighs, and Keith waits, wondering if this is it: this is the push, the lick of fire, the too much to send Lance turning away. 

“You know if I’d had a say, you would have,” Lance replies. 

He doesn’t say anything about the fierce reach of politics, even now, years after the Fire Nation’s stranglehold crumbled into dust. He doesn’t say anything that Keith already knows - how Keith’s presence could set off animosity in delicate Tribe business, a stranger stepping all over something sacred. Even though the world is changing, even though Keith is not the countrymen that came before him. Lance doesn’t need to tell him. Keith knows.  

He hears Lance’s footsteps, and then Lance is there, kneeling on the bedding, absurdly serious, half his face still painted, his waterskin still hanging at his hip. Familiar. 

“I won’t ever go somewhere you can’t follow,” Lance promises him, with that ridiculous earnest expression, the one that makes Keith lean further towards him, his stomach sick with yearning for something he already has. 

_ You just did, _ Keith wants to reply, but it’s not the same thing - that’s not what Lance is saying - and Keith would only be spitting it out to be contrary. To be defensive. So he doesn’t. 

“Make sure you don’t,” Keith mutters. “I’ll only have to come after you anyway,” and leans in, closes his eyes against Lance’s blinding grin.  


End file.
